David Smith's Stamp of Genius

...Smith's later sculptures are less dependent upon a cryptic personal imagery, but even so, his comic and sometimes mordant vision of the figure, his interest in visual and verbal puns, continued strong...

...Inside, on the ground floor, workmen shoved into place a four-wheeled black juggernaut: Smith's 10-foot-long painted-steel Wagon I. Up above, along the spiraling ramp, stood an array of Smith's less physically demanding sculptures—ma-nila shipping tags still dangling from many of them, packing litter strewn around their bases...

...His early welded structures of junk metal and found objects encouraged a school in that vein...

...It includes nearly 100 of the more than 600 sculptures he created in his lifetime and encompasses the entire range of his career...

...Nor was Smith intimidated by the art Establishment...

...Late in his life, Smith remarked on his admiration for the inventor types active in Decatur during his childhood—the germ, it seems, for his own machine shop in Bolton Landing...

...I'm going to make them so big that they can't even be moved"—express an attitude toward the conventions of the art world that has only lately been taken up by the promoters of Earthworks and related phenomena: sculptures built into or dug out from the landscape, which cannot possibly be exhibited in galleries and museums and can only be photographed...

...And it was the terminal point as well for the productive ideas of Europe...

...His training in metalworking came from stints in the Studebaker plant in South Bend, Indiana, and during World War II, at the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady, New York...

...its cluster of machine parts spread along the table create a series of miniature Smith sculptures...

...Their effects, particularly in the earlier sculptures, are everywhere acknowledged without fuss or dissimulation...

...He soon took up with a number of other painters, Jan Matulka, John Graham and Jean Xceron among them, who put him in touch with the vanguard trends in art and literature...

...The complex relationship between the two will no doubt provide work for scholars and historians for some time to come?an eventuality Smith appears to have provided for by leaving a thorough documentary and photographic record of his career...

...Like Pollock, too, he was enormously affected by Picasso, the modern master who?in at least one phase of his work, and in one work in particular, Guernica—managed to combine both of those seemingly contradictory styles...

...The exhibition should provide a shock—a shock of recognition—¦ even to those who have previously admired Smith's work but may never have had the opportunity to study it in retrospective depth...

...It was not the most auspicious occasion for viewing an artist's work, but it was nevertheless evident that the sculpture could hold its own against such disorder...

...Edward F. Fry, who organized the exhibition and wrote the catalogue text, gives an interesting explication of the 1950 sculpture, The Letter, with its sprinkling of O and Y forms, its salutory heading and closing signature...

...Judging from the current retrospective, Smith seems to have begun and concluded his work with a sense of its own equality in relation to Europe...

...Judging from the reports of his friends, he had a sense of his own worth, was difficult with dealers and collectors, refused to make advantageous deals with museums...

...Inventiveness, however, is not the most important feature of his work...

...True, Pollock's breakthrough had an immediate effect upon younger painters both here and abroad, yet the drip technique itself soon proved to be a dead end for most of his followers...

...Did I ever leave Ohio...

...Part of Smith's success, I assume, came from his voracious appetite for anything and everything that might prove interesting or consequential: locomotives, the skeletons of prehistoric birds, Hindu stone carvings, Greek coins, the verbal puns of James Joyce, the works of the old masters...

...Modern styles in sculpture and painting, important as they were to his work, merely provided him with another set of possibilities in a world interestingly full of them...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow David Smith's Stamp of Genius Outside the Guggenheim Museum, in a contest of equals, a big yellow industrial crane was hoisting the clustered stainless steel volumes of David Smith's Cubi XVII onto its pedestal in a little plot of landscaped greenery...

...While one has to concede that Jackson Pollock succeeded in putting American painting on the international map with his large-scale drip paintings of the late '40s and early '50s, his work, viewed in retrospect, does not build as magnificently and surely as Smith's...

...By contrast, Smith opened up avenues of sculpture that are still being traveled...

...Smith began as a painter, studying at the Art Students' League in New York in 1926...

...One of the most striking things about Smith's work in its last two decades is its audacious and inventive shift from the beautifully graphic literalism of The Letter to the thoroughly mastered geometric forms of the Cubi series...

...He was bom in Decatur, Indiana, in 1906 and moved to Paulding, Ohio, at the age of 15...

...As shown at the Guggenheim, in his earlier work he attempted to combine the demands of structural form with a forceful pictorial imagery on political, social and sexual themes...

...Invited to participate in the Spoleto Festival of 1962 and to produce one or two sculptures in a nearby industrial plant...

...At the outset of his career, Smith, like Pollock, was faced by Cubism and Surrealism, the two most influential European movements of the period...

...Smith's triumph may be late in coming?7 years after he began his sculptural career and almost exactly four years after his tragic death in an automobile accident—but it is clear (as at least one or two critics have forewarned us) that he is the greatest and most prodigiously creative artist America has yet produced...

...No other American artist, whether sculptor or painter, has produced such a record of masterworks from one decade to the next...

...His first sculpture was produced in 1932...

...The blunt and unequivocal geometric volumes of his later stainless steel structures (Four Units Unequal, Cubetotem Seven and Six of 1960 and 1961) have also proved to be the immediate precursors for the uncompromising minimalist styles now engaging younger sculptors...

...Even the ambitions Smith stated shortly before his death...

...It was, indeed, a terminal point for factory-ordered machine parts and truckloads of junk metal on which he imposed the new order of art...

...From the beginning—much earlier than current practitioners?Smith was intent upon merging sculpture with painting by means of his polychromed works and his innovative technique of three-dimensional drawing in space...

...The facts of his life can only be sketched out briefly here, though they have a good deal of bearing upon his work...

...The David Smith retrospective now installed at the Guggenheim is the largest and most comprehensive showing of his work to be held in New York...

...In the end, by his daring and robust confidence, he was able to counterpose against the almost sacral European tradition of high art a new art of a secular order, an art of the dedicated amateur, inventor and mechanic—an art of the machine shop...

...Since Smith proceeded to accommodate a good many more influences—Russian Constructivism, de Stijl, the sculptural techniques and Surrealist imagery of Julio Gonzalez and Alberto Giacometti—it seems incredible that he could ever have produced anything more than the worst kind of pastiche...

...It was the example of some welded stuctures by Picasso (made in collaboration with Gonzalez), reproduced in the French periodical Cahiers d'Art, that gave Smith the clue for applying his factory training to the creation of art...

...The sculptures of the '50s, which dominate the museum with their imposing scale and structural authority, successfully resolved this problematic mix...

...One of these, a beautiful homage to the sculptor's workbench included in the Guggenheim exhibition, is Voltri XVI...

...What makes Smith the great American artist, it seems to me, is the fact that no other American has been able to take up into art of such a high order so much of the national experience: the cornball humor, the mechanical ingenuity and the pride taken in it, the tradition of dissent, the grandiose ambitions, the underlying curiosity and ribald humor about the sexual condition of man...

...He sees it as an ironic, three-dimensional translation of the refrain of the popular song, "Why, Oh Why, Oh Why-oh...

...Another is its sheer prodigality...

...With few exceptions, the direct-metal welding technique was one he used throughout his life...

...Smith's productions did not need the careful staging and lighting that another artist's might require...

...At times, and only a bit facetiously, one wonders if the course of American art might not have been vastly different if Picasso's mural had not been stranded here during World War II...

...In fact, the ebullient confidence of Smith's sculpture from the '50s onward now makes the achievement of other American artists seem fitful and hesitant...

...His mother was a retired schoolteacher, his father an engineer with the telephone company and an inventor of sorts...

...What arrived at his doorstep with the imprint of Paris issued forth from the machine shop stamped by his genius with "Made in America...

...But unlike many artists, he appears never to have been frightened off by this welter of European styles...

...Smith amazed everyone by creating 26 in a single month...

...He took them all in his stride and often improved upon them...

...At other times in his career, he took teaching jobs to support himself and the costs of his work...

...He maintained a healthy distance from the art world—the distance, in fact, that could be marked off between 57 th Street and Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he maintained his home and the "factory" that he called the Terminal Iron Works...